-11- 
II. THE CLASSICAL ECONOMISTS 
In 1815 Edward West, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and 
Robert Torrens all published essays which combined Malthus's theory 
of population with the two analytical premises of competitive mar- 
ket exchange and individual pursuit of self-interest and thus der~ 
ived the Ricardian theory of rent.l From this moment there was an 
ongoing dialogue among the Britons who consciously wrote works of 
"political economy," works that explained society's production, dis- 
tribution, and exchange of goods and services in terms of the three 
central ideas listed above. These political economists regarded one 
another not as pamphleteers, politicians, or reformers, but as scien- 
tists: 
There is . • . one great class of social phenomena of 'whi'ch the immediate determining causes are principally those which act through the desire 
for wealth; and in which the psychological law concerned is the familiar one that the greater gain is preferred to the lesser .... A science may be thus constructed which has received the name of political economy.2 
Poli.tical economy: even became chic: 
"Lt has now become high fashion 
1815 is thus the date to consider the beginning of classical 
	, . 1 	3 
polltlca economy. 
Before 1815 the dialogue, and thus the intel- 
lectual community, was tentative, intermittent, and uncertain. After 
1815 it was constant and apparent to all the literate of Britain. 
with D.lue ladies to talk political economy. ,,4 
While 1815 is. a clear beginning, there is no similar sharp 
break to mark an end to classical political economy_ The decline and 

-12- 
supersession of the classical school took decades. 
Furthermore, the decay of classical political economy took 
place on at least three levels. First, original theoretical and empirical work in political economy stopped drawing inspiration from 
the classical tradition. Second, and somewhat later, writers attempting to synthesize and present the whole of political economy ceased presenting it within the classical analytical framework. Third, and latest, university teachers of political economy stopped teaching classical political economy to beginning students. 
After J6hn Stuart Mill wrote his Principles of Political Economy, surprisingly little research was done within classical political economy. Henry Fawcett wrote his The Economic Position of the British Labourer and J.E. Cairnes wrote his Some Leading Principles of Political Economy; these two are eminently classical works that contain original economics. But they stand alone. Instead of drawing on 
the classical tradition, original economic work in the 1870's and 
1880's was conducted in a historicist, an institutionalist, or a 
marginalist vein. Thornton and Walker analyzed the labor market 
from an institutional point of view.5 Jevons and Edgeworth developed marginal utility theory.6 
While on the first level the decay of classical political economy was well advanced by 1870, on the second level the classical 
school stayed strong into the 1880's and 1890's. The first major poli.tical economy textbook after Cairnes's Leading Principles, Henry Sidgwick's Principles of Political Economy of 1883, states that the principal work of political economy remains Mill's Principles, "on 
which the present work must be understood to be primarily founded." 


-13- 
Sidgwick did, however, believe that Mill had made many errors which 
had been corrected b¥ the marginalist Jevons in his Theory of Political7 
Economy.
The decline of the authority and influence of classical political economy is readily apparent in Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics of 1890. Marshall, like Sidgwick, claims to correct the older, classical tradition with advances made by the newer, marginal tradition. Yet Marshall devotes far more space to the pure theory 
of exchange than any classical economist. And those who developed economics from the base provided by Marshall developed it in directions indicated by the marginal, not the classical elements in Marshall.8 
On the level of original economic research, classical political economy was in decay by 1875. On the level of economists' perceptions of the structure of their discipline, classical political economy was showing signs of great weakness by 1890. But on the level of the theories taught to apprentice economists, classical political economy remained healthy until the late 1890's. 
J.S. Mill's Principles remained at the center of the learning of political economy until 1890. Up to that date, the reading for the 
political economy portion of "Moral Sciences" centered around Mill's 
Principles. Various other books--Marshall's Economics of Industry, Walker's The Wages Question, and others--gave detailed accounts of speci£ic topics, but the central theories into which these detailed accounts were to fit were the theories laid down by Mill.9 
In the 1890's, Mill's Principles was partially displaced from its position at the focus of the literature of political economy. 
At Cambridge, the central position was held half by Mill's, and half 


is still one of the most stimulating books that can be put into the hands of students, if they are cautioned against regarding it as final in all its parts. On some topics there is still, in my opinion, nothing better in the English language. 12 
by SidgWick's, Principles. But the lesson to be learned from these 
books, however, remained classical. Students were still supposed to 
learn the "Causes which affect or determine . • • the rate of increas 
of capital and POpulation," and the theory of rent was still placed 
on the same level of importance as the theory of value. 10 
By 1900, however, this had changed. The centerpiece of the 
literature Was now Marshall's ~rinciples of Economics. For the first 
time, Jevons had a place on Cambridge University's Short reading 
list. And Cambridge had thoroughly revised its syllabus so as to 
give much space to neoclassical price theory and to the economic 
role of unions in the labor market."" Yet Mill was not completely 
outmoded. As late as 1909, W.S. Ashley claimed that Mill's ?rinciple~
lived through the decay of classical political economy and the mar- 
of classical Political economy, one certain point emerges. Those Who 
Out of this confused picture of the thirty year long decay 
ginalist reVOlution did not view it as the Violent oVerthrow of clas- 
sical Political economy by a superior. theory. Rather, the dominant 
attitode seems to have been that the marginalists had a new set of 
fore Sidgwick and Marshall attempted to synthesize classical and 
analytical tools that could answer a new set of questions. There- 
neoclassical Political economy. And it happened, for reasons I do 
not understand, that the classical elements of the economics of Mar- 


-15- 
shall faded away in the twentieth century. But the central item on 
the agenda of Sidgwick and Marshall in the late 1880's was to combine 
the economics of Jevons with the older classical political economy. 
And the classical politica+ economy they inherited was the classical 
political economy of Mill's Principles:3
To summarize, classical political economy began in 1815 and 
ended, quietly, sometime between 1875 and 1900. 
Classical political economy was also exclusively British. 
Britain had an enormous influence on economic thought outside itself; 
no one outside Britain had any impact on the political economy of 
the island. Even the political economists of Ireland had difficulty 
getting a hearing in Great Britain.14 And those who did not write 
in English had no influence at all. A figure as important on the 
continent as, say, Sismondi had absolutely no influence on Rica~do 
or Ricardo's pupils.15 No one Qutside the United Kingdom was ever ad- 
mitted to the scientific intellectual community of the classical eco- 
nomists. 
Given these bounds of time and place, it is not difficult to 
sketch out the approximate membership of the community of classical 
economists. 
They fall naturally into four groups. The first consists of 
a single figure: Adam Smith. And his status as a classical economist 
is dubious. Smith did not think of himself as a classical economist; 
none of Smith's contemporaries thought of him as a classical econo- 
mist. His successor at- his professorship, Dugald Stewart, wrote that 
the Wealth of Nations was "a great work. 	. in the science of leg- 


-16- 
islation.,,16 Stewart regarded the Wealth of Nations as a book in the 
tradition of Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws or Rousseau's Social
Contract.
Yet the classical economists all took Smith as the fons et 
origo of their discipline. David Ricardo wrote more than two-thirds 
of his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation=with Smith's treatment of the same topics beside him.17 J.S. Mill wrote his Prin- 
ciples in a conscious attempt to rewrite the Wealth of Nations taking 
advantage of the advances of political economy since 1776.18 The 
Smith, however, that the classical economists viewed as their leader 
is a strangely limited Smith. He see.ms to have written little more 
than Books I and II of the Wealth of Nations; these books contain 
the core of economic theory, and the rest of the work is a sequence 
of three disconnected applications of economic theory (Books III, IV, 
and V) and a philosophical prelude justifying market society (Book I, 
chapters 1-4). 
Yet when the Wealth of Nations is read as if it were a book 
by the author of the Theory of Moral_. Sentiments, it takes on a dif- 
ferent structure. It becomes a study of the origin and consequences-- 
economic, social, political, and cultural--of that great engine of 
progress, the division of labor. The Wealth of Nations traces the 
origin of the division of labor in human nature and the consequences 
of the division of labor for production and distribution all in Book I. 
Tt considers the growth of the prerequisite for the division of labor-- 
capital---in Book II. Book III compares the historical growth of the 
division of labor with the ideal growth of the division of labor. 
Book IV demonstrates how mercantilists have harmed prosperity by harming 


-17- 
the division of labor. And Book V treats the role of the state in 
a society characterized by an increasing division of labor. When 
read in this fashion, the Wealth of Nations is very interesting, 
 .. 	l' 1 1" 	1 	19 

ut It lS not c aSSlca po ltlca economy. 
It is hard to avoid the impression that the field of clas- 
sical political economy was created when Ricardo and his peers 
ripped twelve chapters from the Wealth of Nations and used them-- 
outside the context they had possessed in Smith's mind--as the basic 
foundation of political economy. For all the classical economists, 
despite their frequent acknowledgement of their debt to "the profound work of this celebrated author~,,20 fail to deal with more 
than a small fraction even of that subset of Smith's concerns which 
are present in the Wealth of Nations. Still, Adam-Smith-as-read-by- 
the-classical-economists was a major intellectual presence in classi- 
cal political economy, and so this version of Adam Smith belongs in 
the intellectual community of the classical economists. 
The second group within the classical economists consists of 
the "first gene.ration;" _ of'David:.Ricardo arid his contemporaries. 
They form a distinct subgroup by virtue of their position at the 
beginning of classical political economy. They were all influenced 
by Adam Smith; they all influenced each other; they all influenced 
thei.r successors; but they had no teacher within the intellectual 
community except for Smith himself. Their works were the first co- 
herent shape of classical political economy. Amond them are Ricardo 
himself, James Mill, Thomas Malthus, John Barton, and many others.21 
The next group is the "second generation." Although they 

b

-18- 
also regarded themselves as disciples of Smith, the link was more 
tenuous. The economists of the second generation were more concerned 
with the doctrines of their teachers, the economists of the first gen- 
eration, than with the doctrines of Smith. They by and large wrote 
between 1825 and 1845; they include J.R. McCulloch, Samuel Bailey, 
W.F. Lloyd, George Scrope, Richard Jones, Nassau Senior, Herman Meri- 
vale, and others. 
The third generation of classical economists is commanded by 
the figure of John Stuart Mill. His Principles of Political Economy 
so dominated the field that the next work to claim to be at all sup- 
eri6r to it was published fully twenty-six years after Mill wrote his 
principles.22 Among the third generation, the contemporaries, follow- 
ers, and pupils of J.S. Mill, were Thornton, Fawcett, Cairnes, and-- 
in his moments as an economist rather than a philosoPher--Sidgwick.23 
For them, as for Mill, the Principles served not so much to extend 
economic theory as to state the true doctrines, place them in their 
proper perspective, and put them to work on fact.24 
There were many British writers on economic and social ques- 
tions who were not classical economists. Indeed, to concentrate on 
those regarded as serious economists is to miss many of the most inter- 
esting thinkers on the "Condition-of-England Question" of the nine- 
teenth century. Thomas Hodgskin with his blend of Locke and Ricardo 
to prove the capitalist a parasite, Richard Whately with his belief 
that the working of the Invisible Hand was a divine miracle, Samuel 
Read with his belief that the essence of political economy was to demon- 
strate that property was a natural right and thus that laissez-faire


-19- 
was perfect justice, Thomas Carlyle, Friedrich Engels, and Karl 
Marx--none of these accepted the rules of analysis and argument 
implicit in the constitution of the scientific intellectual community 
of the classical economists. And so none of these is directly rele- 
vant. 
Much more is required to make of the classical economists 
an intellectual community than, say, the fact that their books were 
all filed under "Political Economy" on J.R. McCulloch's bookshelf. 
There must be concrete proofs that they did regard one another as 
colleagues, critics, and audiences, And the channels they used for 
communication must have been many and busy. That the classical eco- 
nomists formed a scientific intellectual community is important for 
an orthodoxy.25 Second, to the degree that classical political eco- 
three reasons. First, if there is no community then it cannot have 
nomy was a science the formation of its doctrines depended on the 
actual structure of the economy; it cannot be explained as merely 
an ideology. Third, the scientific claims of the classical econo- 
mists mean that they can be judged by scientific standards, by how 
well they did or did not capture the essentials of economic life in 
their theories. 
One established channel through wh~ch the classical economists 
communicated was the Political Economy Club.26 The Club was formed in 
1821 largely on the initiative of Ricardo, apparently out of his wish 
to talk with his fellow economists. The Club met seven times a year; 
one economist would set forth a question and an opinion, and then 
those present would argue. The reSUlt was that for seven evenings 


-20- 
a year, economists would spend hours debating economic issues with 
other economists. They argued about the possibility of a general 
glut, the proper reform of the Poor Laws, the source of interest, 
the status of the work of Ricardo, and the progress of political 
economy since Adam Smith.27 Present at the Club's meetings were 
those we today consider the leaders of the classical economists. 
Ricardo, Malthus, James Mill, Tooke, and Torrens--among others-were founding members.28 
Another channel of economic debate was carried by the various 
Reviews. In the thirty-five years after 181~, the Edinburgh Review 
carried about two-hundred and fifty economic articles. A large 
fraction, about one-fourth, were written by McCulloch, the Review's
warhorse. And more than half the economic articles were written by 
members of the Political Economy Club.29 
To the left of the Whig Edinburgh Review was the philosophical 
radicals' Westminster Review, founded at the wish of Bentham and sus- 
tained at various times by James and John Stuart Mill. The Bentham- 
ites used the Westminster Review as an outlet for their politics, and 
so classical political economy--in sympathy with the utilitarian point of view--found a congenial home in the Review.30
Even Tory pUblications opposed to ·the free-trade laissez-faire
doctrines usually supported by classical political economy found it 
necessary to fight political economy with political economy. Three 
leading members of the Political Economy Club, Nassau Senior, George 
Scrope, and Thomas Malthus, wrote articles for the Tory-funded Quar-
	. 	. 31 
terly Revlew. 


-21- 
Economists wrote for newspapers. McCulloch wrote for the 
Scotsman, which he edited, the Courier, and the Times. Others-- 
J.S. Mill and Robert Torrens, to give two examples--also wrote sub- 
stantial amounts for newspapers. And there were pamphlets. The 
listing of pamphlets in MCCulloch's catalogue of the political 
economy section of his library takes up fully half as much space 
as the more detailed listing of full-length books.32 
Furthermore, the classical economists were for the most 
part friends. The friendship between Ricardo and Malthus is famous: 
"And now, my dear Malthus, I have done," writes Ricardo at the end 
of his last letter. "I should not like you more than I do if you 
agreed in opinion with me.,,33 The classical economists thus accumu- 
lated enormous files of economic correspondence. 
But perhaps the most significant channel of communication 
was made out of the full-length expositions of political economy 
themselves. The whole of Ricardo's Principles reads like a set of 
	. 	. 	. 	f 1" 	1 	34 	1 
commentarles on varlOUS prevlous works 0 po ltlca economy. Ma- 
thus wrote his Principles to layout an alternative in political eco- 
		.. . 	db' d 35 

nomy to w at he saw as erroneous oplnlons set own y Rlcar o. 
Torrens wrote his Essay on the Production of Wealth in an attempt 
to strike a balance of truth between the extremes of Ricardo and 
Malthus.36 The classical economists relied almost exclusively on 
one another in their writings. Fully two-thirds of the writers cited 
more than six times in J.S. Mill's Principles were members of the in- 
tellectual community of the classical economists; the rest were cited 
either as empirical references or as examples of error.37 

h

-22- 
In addition to the structure of ties among members of the "invisible college" of classical political economy, there are other more direct reasons for believing that the classical economists formed a scientific intellectual community. 
First, in their own eyes they were such a group. The classical economists had a missionary spirit, a belief that they had insight into Truth and a duty to spread their message over Britain. And the truths they possessed had to do with the idea of political economy and its first conclusion of the desirability of competitive markets. Had the classical economists not formed a distinct intellectual community, it is not possible to see how they could have convinced both themselves and others that they did.38 
Second, all the classical economists looked at the economy from within a certain analytical framework. All the classical economists believed in self-interested human beings whose economic behavior was determined by their economic situation. All worked at a 
high level of aggregation: 
land, labor, and capital on the one hand; 
landlords, laborers, and capitalists on the other. All rejected the transient as theoretically uninteresting; the classical economists sought to discover the natural price, not how a particular reduction in supply would affect the market price .. This complete agreement on an overall analytical framework, on what questions were the interesting ones, is another strong sign that the classical economists formed an intellectual community. 
Last, there seem to have been tacit rules by which theoretical debates could be settled. Such rules--when they require comparing theoretical predictions with empirical happenings--are charac- 


-23- 
acteristic of science. And such principles of decision certainly 
existed within political economy. The appeal to the axiom that what 
was competitively chosen was good was sufficient to make the regula- 
tion of the adult male working day an indefensible proposition within 
classical political economy--the ten hour day interfered with the 
workers' freedom of contract.39 And the Malthusian population prin- 
ciple was nearly overthrown in the 1830's as a result of census re- 
turns that indicated that the empirical consequences of the theory 
  	. 1" d 40 

a not materla lze . 
In fact, the functioning of the "rules" of discussion and 
theory evaluation of classical political economy seems to have pro- 
ceeded remarkably smoothly, far more so than is usually the case in 
science. All contemporary philosophies and methodologies of the 
history of science lay particular stress on the fact that the thought 
of scientific intellectual communities is marked by drastic discon- 
tinuity. Whether called a shift in a paradigm, a supercession of 
a research program, or an "epistemological break," scientific revolu- 
tions do occur. Progress is, in some sense, achieved against normal 
canons of procedure.4l Classical political economy went through nothing 
that could be interpreted as such a period of turmoil until the 1880's. 
And when the turmoil did come, with the so-called "marginal revolution," 
it saw not the replacement of one theoretical system by another that 
better explained the same phenomena but the growth alongside one the- 
oretical system of another that answered different questions. Econ- 
omists tried to synthesize the two, and young economists deserted the 
old, seemingly-sterile classical formulation for the new, seemingly- 
progressive neoclassical formulation. It may be that the lack of 

h
d

-24- 
theoretical turmoil in classical political economy caused it to fail 
to adapt to the changing economy and to seem sterile in the late 
nineteenth century. 
What is the core of the successive orthodoxies of the clas- 
sical economists? Their writings are voluminous and contradictory. 
But the difficult part of distilling classical political economy 
has already been done--by the classical economists themselves. 
They wrote principles of Political Economy, Lectures on 
Political Economy, Outlines of Political Economy. These books were 
expressly intended to summarize the methods, theories, and results 
of political economy. Their authors ,did not expect much economic 
competence from readers: 
"I am, myself, persuaded," wrote James 
Mill, "that nothing fllore is necessary for understanding every part 
of . . • this book, than to read it with attention; such attention 
as persons of either sex, of ordinary understanding, are capable of bestowing.,,42 The authors tried "to give an outlin~ of the Sci- 
ence which treats of the Nature, the Production, and the Distribu- 
tion of Wealth,,,43 to give "expositions of the general principles 
of the subject,,,44 and even to lure additional readers by promis- 
ing them "an easier and a much shorter work" than the standardintro- 
 . 45 uctlon. 

Call these books Principles texts. Each one contains one 
specific economist's view of what classical political economy was, 
in its methods, theories, and results, at the time he wrote--or at 
least it contains his attempt to persuade others to what he thought 
classical political economy ought to be. And no one is better qual- 

d

-25- 
ified to describe the classical economists than themselves~-as long 
as their books are read with an eye to the framework within which 
they wrote. 
There are twelve works by classical economists that I take 
to be Principles texts. The first of them is the foundation, the 
groundwork, the Wealth of Nations of Adam Smith, first published 
in 1776, when that book is read as it was read by Ricardo and his 
fellows. 
The next four Principles texts are by members of the first 
generation of the classical economists. And, taken together, they 
come close to spanning the thought of the first generations. The 
works are, first, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation
by David Ricardo, first published in 1817; second, The Principles of 
Political Economy by Thomas Malthus, first published in 1820; third, 
the Elements of Political Economy by James Mill, first published in 
1821; and last, Robert Torrens's Essay ~ the External Corn Trade of 1815 taken with his Essay ~ the Production of Wealth of 1821.46 
The next four Principles texts are by members of the second 
generation. Three of the authors were solid members of the intel- 
lectual community: George Scrope was a Fellow of the Royal Society, 
a Member of Parliament, a radical democrat, and the leading economic 
writer of the Tory Quarterly Review; Nassau Senior was the first 
Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford; J.R. McCulloch 
was the first professor of political economy at the University of 
London.47 The fourth author, Mountifort Longfield, was definitely 
on the fringes of the intellectual community.48 In order of pUblica- 


-26- 
tion, the second generation's Principles texts are McCulloch's 
Principles of Political Economy of 1825, Scrope's Principles of 
Political Economy of 1833, Longfield's Lectures on Political Economy of 1834, and Senior's Outline of Political Economy of 1836.49 
Last come the three Principles texts of the third generation. 
They are, of course, dominated by John Stuart Mill's Principles of 
Political Economy, first published in 1848, about which enough has 
already been said. Next comes Henry Fawcett's Manual of Political
Economy of 1863, and John. Eliot Cairnes's Some Leading Principles of Political Economy Newly Expounded 9~1§7~.~0 The next Principles
text, the Principles of Political Economy of Henry Sidgwick, begins 
the attempted reconciliation of the classical Mill and the marginal- 
ist Jevons,51 and so it cannot be considered a fully classical work. 
The orthodoxy of the classical political economy of its day is not 
mirrored in it in the same fashion that the earlier orthodoxies of 
classical political economy are mirrored in the twelve Principles
texts of the classical economists.